Marksmanship is a foundational skill required of soldiers, law enforcement personnel and any civil servant entrusted with a firearm. Great emphasis is placed upon the acquisition and maintenance of marksmanship skill throughout a soldier's or civil servant's career.
The marksmanship instructor is the shooter's first and best resource for the acquisition and maintenance of this vital skill. The marksmanship instructor faces many demands upon his/her time and abilities. In modern military and law enforcement firing ranges, each instructor typically oversees four students simultaneously. Time on the firing range and ammunition for training is limited and expensive. Any deficiencies in a particular shooter's performance that require a disproportionate amount of an instructor's time to diagnose and remediate takes instruction away from the other shooters. Reshoots and retries consume both valuable time and ammunition. Furthermore, a shooter that cannot demonstrate proper marksmanship at the range quickly enough is in danger of being removed from the firing line and forced to repeat more basic training, incurring more expense.
The marksmanship instructor is tasked with teaching his/her students the fundamentals of marksmanship in the safest, quickest and most effective way possible. The Armed Services have identified several marksmanship fundamentals including aiming, breath control, trigger squeeze and steady position. If a shooter is not accurate, she is usually deficient in one or more of these fundamentals. However, the root cause of a shooter's poor marksmanship is not always readily apparent even to an experienced instructor.
The difficulty and danger of close observation of the shooter at the live fire range, the small physical differences between acceptable and poor weapon handling, and the extremely transient nature of firing events force instructors to very often rely solely on the most heuristic measure of performance available to them: the fall of shot. A poor fall of shot, however, is only the symptom of poor marksmanship. The marksmanship instructor often cannot determine in which fundamental the shooter is lacking solely from their fall of shot.
Therefore marksmanship instructors need something to aid them in monitoring marksmanship fundamentals. Technology that can mitigate these inherent difficulties and expose the root causes of poor marksmanship will increase the marksmanship instructor's efficiency, effectiveness and analytic capability and is consequently of great value to both the instructor and the student.